Electronic data communications, particularly electronic mail (email), is increasingly prevalent for both business and personal uses. Email services may be offered to users by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Such businesses host a user's email account providing the user with a mailbox and a user interface with which to send and receive email. Many email users desire to have email communication capabilities available to them on a round-the-clock basis and at their finger tips. Users with handheld data communication devices often desire to use their ISP-hosted email services through their handheld devices such as cellular phones, personal data assistants (PDA) and the like having email capabilities to allow the users to have quick access to messages and remain connected to others.
A mail notification receiver alerts a mail retrieval system when new incoming electronic mail arrives in the user's ISP mailbox. Once the mail retrieval system is alerted of the presence of new mail, it will then automatically retrieve the new mail from the user's mailbox and send it off to the user's device where the mail can be read (e.g. handheld or desktop). Many mail retrieval systems are implemented using a polling approach where the mail retrieval system periodically requests new electronic mail from a user's ISP mailbox. This method of mail retrieval has several disadvantages. Under a polling system, the user is only notified that new electronic mail has arrived after the mail retrieval system has made a polling request and not necessarily when the mail in fact arrives in the user's mailbox. Consequently, the receipt of the electronic mail suffers from a time delay by an amount determined by a preset polling interval (the period between requests to see if new mail has arrived in the user's mailbox). Another difficulty is that where the user has several mailboxes, the mail retrieval system must poll each mailbox separately. This too is time consuming and resource intensive, requiring communication between the mail retrieval system and multiple ISP mail storage servers.
An alternative approach involves building and integrating a dedicated notification server into the ISP's current architecture. The notification server may poll more efficiently and at more frequent intervals, detect incoming mail when it reaches the mail storage server and before it reaches a user's mailbox, scan data buffers for new incoming mail, or detect new mail as it is being directed to a user's mailbox. However, implementation of such an alternative approach requires a significant amount of resources that the ISP may be unable or unwilling to pay.
A solution which addresses one or more of these issues is therefore desired.